Saturday, February 16, 2013

Pizza Driver

There’s something about it that I miss. Flying
through the empty suburban streets all night, alone and stoned. Listening to so
much music. It was special, solitary and workman-like in a way that I haven’t
felt since...

Wet streets under light rain beneath flickering and
fading street lamps. Each corner, each stop light, each road sign was another
chance to reflect on the lonely emptiness of suburbia.

Delivering pizzas is the true way…or the truer way.
It’s a zen koan. Doing meaningless work brings meaning. Figure it out for
yourself.

Teaching doesn’t make me feel that way. It makes me
feel sort of old and pitiful. I’m not old but it feels that way sometimes. How
could I be an authority figure? My own life is a mess of indecision and well
intentioned, but ultimately poor judgment.

On Saturdays I would work until 1 or 2 in the
morning. Some nights I’d have to clean marinara sauce off the seats of my car.
Other nights it was buffalo sauce. Then I’d go home late, smoke and
watch Nature on PBS. At those times, I was alone, completely alone, but I felt
closer to the world.

When I come home from work now I just do more work.
Work that seems to go nowhere and has no effect. I start and end a semester by
correcting the same mistakes and offering the same unheeded advice.

I have no friends at work now. There are just
students. When they laugh at my jokes I wonder if they actually think I’m funny
or if they’re just trying to get ahead. If I like them at all I go easier on
them.

In my pizza/salad days, there was always someone to
dick around with. A cook missing some teeth, a grizzled veteran driver that had
been working for the same store for 15 or 20 years, a lesbian with a pock
marked face (80% of the women in the pizza industry are lesbians), a poor busboy
from St. Louis who rapped poorly, a manager who worked 60 hours a week and
hated his life…

I miss the tips too, the random ones. Not the money
but everything else people would scrounge up. One time I got a mango which I
promptly ate in the car. Another time a can of Tecate which I chugged mostly in
their front yard but finished in the car (later I returned to the same place
and was disappointed they didn’t offer me a second)…cigarettes, bowl rips, one
time I smoked weed with a crack head couple in a dirt bag motel off the highway
(the foil pipe was as shitty as it got), one time some lady gave me a DVD porn
and said she worked at a sex shop. When I brought it back to work, my manager
and I watched it in the back room but the cook working with us ran away and hid.

People would pay me to give them rides. Teenagers,
drunk people. Sometimes I would deliver booze or smokes for old men. They
always tipped well.

People now think it’s really prestigious that I’m a
college adjunct. Most of them don’t know what the word adjunct means, but they
know I teach college part time. My friends tell their acquaintances and
actually ask me to tell others sometimes when we’re out.

“Tell them what you do,” Jerry says to me with a big
Gomer Pyle grin on his face. He stares at me, perched on the end of a bar
stool. He never went to college and he’s an alcoholic. To him I might as well
be an astronaut, it’s that exotic.

I brush off his suggestion and try to avoid telling
anyone anything about myself. It’s better that way. “He’s a professor!”

Fuck, then I is (spell check told me to put that
instead of “I am”) in for some questions and some real shitty conversation.

“So you teach like, writing then? I really admire
you.” Thanks. No matter who they are or what they do I inevitably tell them
they make more money than I do. Not that it matters, but I could be delivering
pizzas again and make just as much.

It’s then I become the sounding board for
everybody’s English experience. What books they loved, hated, they all come up.
It’s hard to avoid I guess. We could talk about punctuation or grammar, and
that does come up, but that is so much more tedious and pointless. Somehow I
become the punching bag for every issue they ever had with teachers in high
school or community college English. And people have a lot of issues.

One time my friend’s sister asked me when you were
supposed to use “whom.” I can’t remember if I knew or not, but I just told her
I wasn’t sure. She shrugged her shoulders and said, “the English teacher
doesn’t even know, see!” It seemed like an awkward topic to discuss when we
were in a hospital room with her brother/my best friend terminally ill from
leukemia in the bed next to us. Some of her immediate family was sitting around
the bed as well.

I never had the heart to tell her about using whom
with prepositions when I saw her again at her brother’s funeral a couple months
later. Their younger brother came up to me when I walked in the church and
asked me to read a Bible verse about fathers and sons. Nobody else would do it
because they were too upset. I looked over at their cousin sulking and agreed
to do it.

I can’t really remember what it said but everyone
thought I did a real fine job up at the pulpit. They said it was because I was
a professor and I knew how to speak in front of people.

When we were crowded around eating at their house
after the funeral, their dad started yelling something confusing and incoherent
at me. He was a big Italian man who’d come over on a boat as a kid. Sometimes
he suffered from emotional outbursts. Right in front of everybody, he said he
wanted me to start a charity in his son’s name and use all the money that had
been given to the family. He said I was the smart one and I needed to study up
on it.

I never did though. I think somebody else might’ve.
I guess it doesn’t require the kind of smarts I have.